“Hey.” She hesitated before she crossed the apartment to him.
If he’d been away for more than twenty-four hours, there was always a hiccup or two upon reentry. An awkward stumble toward reassembly. He’d left their lives, after all, the things that defined them as “we,” which meant they each had spent the week becoming “I.” And just when that had become the new normal, he stepped back into the frame. And they tried to figure out where “I” ended and “we” began again.
They kissed and it was dry, almost chaste.
“You tired?” she asked because he looked it.
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” He looked at his watch. “It’s, what, midnight over there.”
“I made you some dinner.”
He smiled broadly and easily, the first real Brian smile since he’d come through the door. “No way. Going all domestic on me and whatnot? Thanks, babe.”
He kissed her a second time and this one had a little heat to it. She felt something loosen in her and returned the kiss in kind.
They sat and ate salmon cooked in foil with brown rice and a salad. He asked her about her week and she asked him about London and the conference, which apparently hadn’t gone well.
“They set up these boards so they can convince the world they give a shit about the environment and the ethics of timber acquisition. Then they stack the board with industry assholes whose only ambition besides sampling the local hookers is to make sure nothing gets done.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and sighed. “It’s, um, frustrating.” He looked down at his empty plate. “You?”
“What about me?”
“You seemed off whenever we talked on the phone.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
As he yawned into his fist and gave her a weary smile, it was clear he didn’t believe her. “I’m gonna shower.”
“Okay.”
He cleared their plates and put them in the dishwasher. As he headed for the bedroom, she said, “All right. You want to know?”
He turned just short of the doorway and let loose a soft sigh of relief. Held out his hands. “That would be lovely.”
“I saw your double.”
“My double?”
She nodded. “Getting into a black Suburban behind the Hancock on Monday afternoon.”
“When I was in the air?” He stared back at her, confused. “So, give me a sec here because I’m wiped . . . uh, you saw a guy who looked like me and—”
“No, I saw your double.”
“So maybe you saw Scott—”
“—Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont? I considered that. Problem was, this guy was also dressed in the exact same clothes you left the house in.”
He took that in with a slow nod. “You didn’t think you saw my double. You thought you saw me.”
She poured them both a little more wine and brought his glass to him. She leaned against the back of the couch. He leaned against the doorjamb.
“Yes.”
“Ah.” He closed his eyes and smiled and a weight seem to rise from his body and leave through the vent above him. “So the weird tone and the selfie you wanted me to send that was all because you thought . . .” He opened his eyes. “You thought what?”
“I didn’t know what I thought.”
“Well, you either thought Scott Pfeiffer made a trip into Boston or that I was lying about being out of the country.”
“Something like that.” It sounded so ridiculous now.
He grimaced and drank some wine.
“What?” she asked. “No, what?”
“You think that little of us?”
“No.”
“You thought I was living some kind of double life.”
“I definitely didn’t say that.”
“Well, what else would it be? You claim you saw me on a street in Boston when I was on a 767 over probably, I dunno, Greenland by that point. So you grill me about where I am when I call from Heathrow and you grill me about not charging my phone and—”
“I didn’t grill you.”
“No? And then you ask me to take a picture of myself so I can prove I’m, you know, exactly where I’d fucking said I’d be, and then you go out with my partner and, what, grill him too?”
“I’m not going to listen to this.”
“Why would you? You might actually have to take responsibility for acting like an asshole.” He lowered his head and held up a weary hand. “You know what? I’m tired. I’m not going to say anything helpful right now. And I need to, I dunno, process this. Okay?”
She tried to decide how angry she wanted to stay and if she was mad at him or just herself. “You called me an asshole.”
“No, I said you were acting like one.” A thin smile. “It’s a small distinction but a meaningful one.”
She gave him back her own thin smile, placed a hand to his chest. “Go take your shower.”
He closed the bedroom door behind him and she could hear the water run.
She found herself standing over his raincoat. She put her wine on a side table and wondered why she didn’t feel guilt right now. She should; he was right—she’d walked down an insulting road thinking her husband of two years was so untrustworthy that he’d lie about which city he was in. But she didn’t feel guilt. All week she’d told herself that what she’d seen had been an optical illusion. The selfie proved it. Their own history together, one in which she’d never known him to lie about anything, proved it.
So why didn’t she feel mistaken? Why didn’t she feel guilty about mistrusting him? Not wholeheartedly, of course, not with full certitude. But just a little bit, just a niggling sense that all was not as it should be.
She took his raincoat off the back of the chair where he’d left it, a pet peeve of hers. He couldn’t just reach into the hall closet and hang it on a hanger?
She reached into the left pocket and came back with an airline ticket—Heathrow to Logan, dated today—and some loose change. His passport was there too. She opened it and rifled through the visa pages, which were cramped with stamps from all the countries he’d visited. Problem was, the stamps weren’t in any kind of order. They seemed to show up on whichever page the immigration officer had decided to flip to that day. She listened to the muffled sound of the water running in the bathroom and continued to rifle the pages—Croatia, Greece, Russia, Germany, and then there it was: Heathrow on May 9, this year. She returned the passport to his coat and reached into the other pocket: a swipe card for the Covent Garden Hotel, 10 Monmouth Street, and a tiny receipt the size of her thumb for a news and magazine shop just up the street at 17 Monmouth. It was dated today, 05/09/14, 11:12 in the morning, and gave evidence that Brian bought a newspaper, a pack of gum, and a bottle of Orangina, and paid with a 10-pound note and received 4.53 pounds sterling as change.
The shower turned off. She put the swipe card back in the pocket of the coat and returned the coat to the back of the chair. But she slipped the receipt into the back pocket of her jeans. She had no idea why. Instinct.
17
GATTIS